Recs on the weather jar comment are still welcome.
Friday Coffee Hour and check-in is an open thread and general social hour.
It’s traditional but not obligatory to give us a weather check where you are and let us know what’s new, interesting, challenging or even routine in your life lately. Nothing is particularly obligatory here except:
π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any Euclidean plane circle’s circumference to its diameter; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. It is approximately equal to 3.14159265 in the usual decimal notation. Many formulae from mathematics, science, and engineering involve π, which makes it one of the most important mathematical constants
The Wikipededia continues:
π is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends or repeats. It is also a transcendental number, which implies, among other things, that no finite sequence of algebraic operations on integers (powers, roots, sums, etc.) can be equal to its value
That is a lot to digest, especially irrational and transcendental which seem more suited for talk of personalities rather than numbers. So lets look at some other things about pi.
You cannot celebrate pi day in Europe because 14.3 is not the same as 3.14. Actually, you could celebrate it but it would require some explaining.
The Guinness World Book record for memorized digits is 67,890 held by Lu Chao of China. It took 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite.
If 3.14 feels somewhat, well, incomplete, it is because it is. Even this needs elipses.
over the wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, the clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bloatedness and bottomlessness.
It’s neverendingness (∞) has been used to thwart criminals:
In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Wolf in the Fold”, after a murderous alien entity (which had once been Jack the Ripper) takes over the Enterprise’s main computer with the intention of using it to slowly kill the crew, Kirk and Spock draw the entity out of the computer by forcing it to compute pi to the nonexistent last digit, causing the creature to abandon the computer, allowing it to be beamed into space.
I did this last year, but I think everyone is in need of some inspirational stuff, and I’m going to try to spread some good feelings around.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly had better years. But I’ve been trying to think about helping others who need it, as a way of getting out of my own space. I do the Hill Country Ride for AIDS every year, because the agencies it benefits help people out every day. They have a food bank, for people who really need it – and people with AIDS have to be very mindful about nutrition, about the timing, and what they eat…. so there are people who counsel about that. There’s legal assistance, medical subsidies, volunteers to drive people to appointments….. Just help, that their clients really need.
So I was thinking about why. Why help? What do I get out of it? I did some searching, and the results of my quest are below the squiggly thing. Of course, if you want to skip the inspirational quotes, the video & the U2 song, you could donate at my Hill Country Ride page now.
Oh – and a picture. Here’s a picture from the year I was top fundraiser (not gonna happen this year, I’m very late getting started this year), but anyway:
Marie T. Freeman
If you’re too busy to give your neighbor a helping hand, then you’re just too darned busy.
——————————————————————————–
Sam is 50 years old and has been living with AIDS for over 16 years, receiving assistance from AIDS Services of Austin periodically for ten years. There she has found a connection with others who have the same needs. She has an outlet to give back by exchanging her story and encouraging others to live in a positive way. The help she has received through ASA’s Food Bank and the Medical Nutrition Therapy program has truly transformed her life.
Sam became a success story because of YOU who have donated. There are thousands more who need you too, and the numbers keep rising.
Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.
——————————————————————————–
Maria is 27 years old. She had been positive for several years when she discovered she was pregnant. She moved into Roosevelt Gardens, where she had a nice place to call home with rent she could afford. With the support of Project Transitions’ HIV Services and the David Powell Health Center, she had a healthy pregnancy and her baby boy was born healthy and HIV negative. Now she is back at work, and thanks to you has the resources and support she needs to care for her son.
We want to keep people like Maria healthy. People with AIDS deal with so many other illnesses that exacerbate each other and the agencies we fund address the full care continuum. Staying healthy pre-empts expensive illnesses that make people miss work or lose their jobs – it keeps people going. For every $100 spent on keeping people healthy and on their health care, we save $1,000 on expensive emergency room visits. It just makes sense not just for our hearts, but also for the whole community.
Woodrow Wilson
There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.
——————————————————————————–
Project Transitions
Project Transitions is dedicated to providing hospice, housing and support to people affected by HIV/AIDS in a compassionate and caring environment. Its hospice, Doug’s House, is the only facility in central Texas dedicated to in-house medical care for patients with AIDS and AIDS-related complications. Project Transitions also provides affordable, transitional housing with supportive services for individuals and families affected by HIV through three housing programs: Roosevelt Gardens, Highland Terrace and Community Housing. These programs are partially supported by the proceeds from its thrift store, Top Drawer, which has been open since 1993. Project Transitions’ goal is to help transition the homeless by providing support to gain the life-skills needed to live independently, and then move into long-term, affordable housing of their own. projecttransitions.org
they are one of the beneficiary agencies, you can help them by donating at
If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
——————————————————————————–
The Wright House Wellness Center
Since 1988, The Wright House Wellness Center has offered care and compassion to Central Texans affected by or at risk of HIV and other chronic illnesses. Wright House provides resources for support, education and empowerment. Services include: HIV/Hepatitis C testing, education and prevention programming, HIV/Hepatitis C case management, HIV food bank and nutrition services, HIV mental health services, and complementary health therapies (acupuncture, massage therapy and yoga) for persons affected by HIV and/or Hepatitis C. thewrighthouse.org
my favorite quote about helping:
Anne Frank
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
——————————————————————————–
and yeah, I know you’ve seem this video, but I’m gonna make you cry again:
In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.
——————————————————————————–
Friends of David Powell Health Center
Through the Friends of David Powell Health Center, money raised helps support the only public clinic in Austin specializing in medical care for persons with HIV and AIDS. The Clinic provides primary care, medical case management, immunizations, nutritional counseling and health education services to uninsured and underinsured patients in all stages of HIV infection. fodpc.org
Dr. Loretta Scott
We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.
——————————————————————————–
here’s a video with people talking about why they do this ride:
and the U2 song – because, well, yes I am a fangirl, I hope you find it at uplifting as I do – uplifting in a scary kind of way, because my guys remind us that there is no “them” who is going to help people who need it, there’s only us:
Fierces on the Weather Critter Comment are obligatory welcome.
The morning check-in is an open thread posted to give you a place to visit with the meeses. Feel free to chat about your weather, share a bit of your life, grump (if you must), rave (if you can). The diarist du jour sometimes posts and runs, other times sticks around for a bit, often returns throughout the day and always cares that meeses are happy … or at least contented.
For those new to the Moose, Kysen left a Moose Welcome Mat (Part Deux) so, please, wipe your feet before you walk in the front door start posting.
The important stuff to get you started:
– Comments do not Auto-refresh. Click the refresh/reload on your tab to see new ones. Only click Post once for comments. When a diary’s comment threads grow, the page takes longer to refresh and the comment may not display right away.
– To check for replies to your comments, click the “My Comments” link in the right-hand column (or go to “My Moose”). Comments will be listed and a link to Recent Replies will be shown. (Note: Tending comments builds community)
– Ratings: Fierce means Thumbs Up, Fail means Thumbs Down, Meh means one of three things: I am unFailing you but I can’t Fierce you, I am unFiercing after a mistaken Fierce, … or Meh. Just Meh. (p.s. Ratings don’t bestow mojo, online behaviour does).
– The Recommended list has a prominent place on the Front Page because it reflects the interests of the Moose. When people drive-by, we want them to see what we are talking about: news, politics, science, history, personal stories, culture. The list is based on number of recs and days on the list. Per Kysen: “The best way to control Rec List content is to ONLY rec diaries you WANT to see ON the list.”
– Finally, the posting rules for a new diary: “Be excellent to each other… or else”
(Some other commenting/posting/tending notes for newbies can be found in this past check-in and, of course, consult Meese Mehta for all your questions on meesely decorum.)
Since its founding in 1989, the World Wide Web has touched the lives of billions of people around the world and fundamentally changed how we connect with others, the nature of our work, how we discover and share news and new ideas, how we entertain ourselves and how communities form and function.
The timeline below is the beginning of an effort to capture both the major milestones and small moments that have shaped the Web since 1989. It is a living document that we will update with your contributions.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine – the original web server – is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website, in 2013 CERN reinstated the world’s first website to its original address.
On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.
A Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll put the Republican governor’s statewide popularity at an all-time low — it has dropped 20 percentage points since November. Forty-one percent of voters surveyed said they approved of Christie’s job performance, compared to 44 percent who disapproved. According to the newspaper, this is the first time since Christie took office in 2010 that the poll shows Christie’s job approval underwater. The three-point difference, however, is within the poll’s 3.7 point margin of error. The poll surveyed 703 New Jersey voters between March 4 and March 9.
General Motors may be facing a criminal investigation over its delay in recalling vehicles with faulty ignition switches blamed for 13 deaths and 31 accidents, and are reporting.
“People around here are so afraid of losing the coal industry because of the fictitious ‘war on coal’ that they will do anything to try to give coal an edge, or the industry an edge,” he said.
But the decline of coal in Central Appalachia is impossible to ignore, and while transitioning its focus away from the coal industry may be what West Virginia needs to do to survive, changing the economy and culture of a state long dependent on coal – with many of its leaders still loyal to the coal industry – has proven to be an uphill battle.
People around here are so afraid of losing the coal industry because of the fictitious ‘war on coal’ that they will do anything to try to give coal an edge.
“Simply put, we need to put a new economy in place,” said David Graham, who’s running for the West Virginia House of Delegates
WASHINGTON (AP) – The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday the CIA improperly searched a stand-alone computer network established for Congress in its investigation of allegations of CIA abuse in a Bush-era detention and interrogation program and the agency’s own inspector general has referred the matter to the Justice Department.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she had “grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution,” as she publicly aired an increasingly explosive dispute between Congress and the spy agency.
A strong area of low pressure developing over the Ohio Valley tonight doesn’t only spell tribble for the winter fatigued from Chicago to Maine expecting as much as two feet of snow, but a powerful cold front encroaching on a warm, moist airmass over the Mid-Atlantic will help touch off a nasty line of thunderstorms that could be severe, including the potential for a weak tornado or two.
~
Editor’s Note: Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.
(This diary is written by an American expat living in the European Union who is a male business librarian who holds a graduate library degree (MLS) and a Master’s degree in business administration in marketing).
As an American librarian I am glad to be living in the European Union where library funding isn’t under attack to the extent that it is back home in the United States, because readership, literacy and an open based knowledge system that is publicly funded is still valued. In America, library budgets have become low hanging fruit for conservative local and state politicians. Louisiana is the worse case in point where Gov. Bobby Jindal has eliminated state library funding all together. Not only does it beg the question will your state be next but it asks the question what will you do when they come for your library and your kid’s summer reading program? Do you really know how many books it’s really going to take to make that special child or grandchild in your life a lifelong reader. Do you think you have anywhere near those numbers of books in your private collection?
Please let’s remember the voluminous studies that have been done year after year, decade after decade that show us that prison inmates for the most part are functionally illiterate and that teen pregnancy is directly linked to literacy rates.
Christian Science Monitor: November 18, 2013
Louisiana residents choose libraries over jail to receive funds Residents of Lafourche Parish in Louisiana recently voted down a proposal that would have used money currently going to local libraries to build a new prison.
85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate.
More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate.
Penal institution records show that inmates have a 16% chance of returning to prison if they receive literacy help, as opposed to 70% who receive no help. This equates to taxpayer costs of $25,000 per year per inmate and nearly double that amount for juvenile offenders.
Illiteracy and crime are closely related. The Department of Justice states, “The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure.” Over 70% of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.
People who don’t grow up as lifelong readers grow up in an America living under a form of de facto censorship and what it means is that the censor, by withholding library funding, limits access to reading materials to children from a young age. So they don’t get to see the other side of the coin and wind up developing a one-sided point of view which has been historically associated with sexism, homophobia, racial bigotry and other forms of intolerance and hate. If we don’t support libraries, we support going backwards in a type of devolution of the past which is exactly what the Tea Party types mean when they say they want their country back.
My question to you Mr or Mrs Progressive America, just how far back in time will you let the haters take us? Will you let them take us back to a point in time when women didn’t have the right to choose, a time before the civil rights movement would let anyone who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or when a time at the back of the bus was reserved, a time when people were hated for who they are or for who they loved or for what God they believed in, that is their America. But it’s not our America, it’s not the progressive America that we’ve come to love and aspire to, because that America is supported by your neighborhood library as an open knowledge learning center, where everyone is treated the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s the mayor or a homeless person, you can expect to receive the same level of service. You can expect to have access to a collective repository of everyone whose ever thought and everyone whose ever written, that’s why I became a librarian and a reader and a listener and someone who you can count on to resist censorship in all of its guises. That includes false arguments related to library funding.
Source: From the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy – U.S. Illiteracy Statistics (as of 2013)
Percent of U.S. adults who can’t read: 14 %
Number of U.S. adults who can’t read: 32 Million
Percent of U.S. adults who read below a 5th grade level: 21 %
Percent of prison inmates who can’t read: 63 %
Percent of high school graduates who can’t read: 19 %
The library is a public good. It belongs to everyone but only for as long as you’re willing to defend it. Public libraries due to budget cuts are cutting their operating hours, their services and yes too many are shutting their doors. Therefore this action diary asks you in support of your local library to write a letter to the editor today and to do it for yourself and do it for the special children in your life. Do it for your community and tell them that you support full community library funding today, tomorrow and forever.
——————————————-
Updated information regarding the functioning of the library as an adult education center, made at the request of a reader.
The library as a children & adult learning center
One of the best parts about being a librarian is the information sharing. So I am pleased to have the opportunity to share with you my experience of working in the library as a children’s and adult education center. You always hear these wonderful stories about adults who have come into the library, people of great skill and are essentially completely self educated. Though many librarians hold multiple graduate degrees and often PhDs as well, particularly in academic libraries. I can honestly say some of the most educated people I have encountered were self-educated lawyers. I am from Washington State back when I was living in the U.S. and Washington is one of those states that allows you to be a lawyer without having to go to law school. So I worked with a number of lawyers who were basically self-educated people who served under an apprenticeship under another lawyer who helped them. So they came to the law library with their learning contracts and we worked with them. I have to tell you this was one of the most fulfilling experiences in my working life. So you see libraries really do work. They really are great adult learning centers. They always have been. Let’s not lose that, because libraries are an American success story. Please support your community libraries. Thanks.
Recs on the weather jar comment are still welcome.
The common Moose, Alces alces, unlike other members of the deer family, is a solitary animal that doesn’t form herds. Not so its rarer but nearest relative, Alces purplius, the Motley Moose. Though sometimes solitary, the Motley Moose herds in ever shifting groups at the local watering hole to exchange news and just pass the time.
The morning check-in is an open thread and general social hour.
It’s traditional but not obligatory to give us a weather check where you are and let us know what’s new, interesting, challenging or even routine in your life lately. Nothing is particularly obligatory here except:
Today is the anniversary of Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, A Raisin in the Sun, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York City on March 11th, 1959. Hansberry’s “Raisin” was the first play written by a black woman to be performed on the Broadway stage.
Hansberry, who was born May 19, 1930 in Chicago, died young, at age 35, on January 12, 1965, from pancreatic cancer. She was eulogized by many at her funeral in Harlem and the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” sung by Nina Simone, who was a close friend was composed in her memory.
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory has accomplished three major tasks in this very important and absorbing book. She has first of all given an historical overview of black women playwrights in this twentieth century; second, she has analyzed and assessed the works of three major examples: Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange; and third, she has given some objective thought to the general structure and criticism of drama as a whole, with particular emphasis on black drama.
…
It is good to remember that American drama has really come of age in the twentieth century, that plays on the American stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were really little more than glorified minstrels, farces, and melodramas. Eugene O’Neill is the first great name in the Hall of American Playwrights and following him there may be about a half dozen great names: Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman. So it is not surprising that black theater in America had its real beginnings with the Harlem Renaissance, and in that famous group at least four women wrote plays. They were May Miller, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Angelina Weld Grimke. Since Johnson was the most successful of these four, with her Plumes ( 1927) appearing off-Broadway, Brown-Guillory chooses her as her first example, showing the tradition out of which subsequent black women playwrights have come.
We’ve written about Hansberry’s life at Black Kos in the past, exploring her family history and the role they played in housing desegregation.
Many of you are too young to have seen the first production on Broadway, which starred Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ivan Dixon, Lonne Elder, John Fiedler and Ed Hall, but you may have seen the film in which most of the original Broadway cast starred in 1961.
On Monday, 28 senators are planning on staying up all night talking about climate change, an effort that aims to “wake up Congress” about the seriousness of the issue.
The “talkathon” will start after Senate’s last votes Monday and is expected to last until Tuesday at 9 a.m. It was organized by the Climate Action Task Force, a group launched in January whose goal is to take an aggressive stance on climate change in Congress. Twenty-six Democrats and two independents have committed to attend the talkathon and are planning to tweet throughout the night using the hashtag #Up4Climate.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), one of the members of the task force who will be participating in the talkathon, said the goal of the all-nighter was “to break the pattern of the Senate and show the interest of at least 20 senators who will be participating through the night.”
The scientists have done their work: We now better understand the human causes of climate change and we understand its profound and accelerating impact. Unfortunately, too many policy makers deny the evidence, or refuse to cross political lines to solve the problem. But it is time that we wake up and act on climate change.
We have taken some steps in the right direction. This past summer, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan to cut carbon pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency has begun creating new carbon emission standards for future power plants. The Department of Energy is working on ground-breaking energy technologies, and the Department of Transportation is studying transportation planning to address future risks and vulnerabilities from extreme weather and climate change. The Transportation Department is also addressing vehicle fuel efficiency which is saving vehicle owners and operators billions of dollars a year. While these are all positive changes, it should concern us all that they are not nearly enough to address the problem at hand. Congress needs to lift its blinders and wake up to this problem by enacting legislation that prioritizes renewable energy development, supports energy efficient technologies, and taxes carbon pollution.
The President’s proposed budget shows how we can strengthen our economy and bring down our deficits while expanding opportunity for every American. Brian Deese, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, took to the whiteboard to show what that looks like. And after that, we’ve put together a graphic explaining what else the budget does. Take a look, and pass it on.
The U.S. uninsurance rate has hit another five-year low as Americans continue enrolling in health coverage during Obamacare’s first open enrollment period, according to a new Gallup survey. All told, the uninsurance rate in the first three months of 2014 stood at 15.9 percent, compared to 17.1 percent in the last quarter of 2013 – and the largest drops in uninsurance occurred among African Americans and lower-income people, who are among the most likely to benefit from the ACA’s financial assistance.
The number of uninsured Americans has dropped by three to four million since Obamacare coverage took effect Jan. 1, according to a new Gallup survey. How much of the drop can be precisely attributed to the health care law is a matter of debate, though there are signs that enrollment among the uninsured is picking up.
What isn’t up for debate: Republicans are now confronted with a fork in the road in how they approach Obamacare. Repeal or relent.
Every newly insured American undermines the “repeal” stance that has been the party’s status quo over the last four years. But relenting, acknowledging the law won’t be undone and pivoting to more of a “fix” mentality isn’t going to be easy either, given the demands of the far-right.
Since 2006, the Meteorological Phenomena Identification Near the Ground (mPING) program run by the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) has helped meteorologists improve their forecasts and weather radar algorithms by using public reports to determine what type of precipitation is falling at ground level around the country.
mPING allows the public to report precipitation type, intensity, and duration to the NSSL using the mobile app available for free through iTunes and Google Play.
~
Editor’s Note: Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.
